Clinton comes to Harlem

The President chooses a neighborhood most like himself

By Roger Rosenblatt

If a man could morph into a neighborhood, Bill Clinton would be
Harlem. So when the former President decided to forsake expensive
and unseemly midtown-Manhattan office space and set up shop
uptown, at 55 West 125th St., in the most famous African-American
area in the country, one knew that it was a personal decision,
not just a politically clever one.

He said as much when he toured the neighborhood and recalled that
as a student in the 1960s, he used to "walk down 125th Street all
the way west. And people would come up and ask me what I was
doing here, and I said I don't know, I just liked it; I felt at
home."

The thing about Harlem, and the President too, is that you don't
know where you are from day to day, but you do know you are in a
place that is exciting, tragic, alternately deadly and life
affirming, beautiful, melancholy, delicious, religious, full of
equal doses of history and flim-flam, and above all, enduring.
Langston Hughes, a Harlem Renaissance writer, created a character
for his columns called Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, who boasted:
"I've been insulted, eliminated, locked in, locked out, and left
holding the bag. But I am still here." Sound familiar?

When told of the Harlem move, comedian Chris Rock exulted: "He's
black, he's blue, he's just the best of all time." Clinton is the
national bad boy, yet he is also the best. He has always seemed
most comfortable in black churches, where one senses that his
soul--the decent-if-boiling entity so frequently disguised by
bad-boy behavior--was truly connected.

The Harlem-office decision in some ways certifies that
connection. Ever since it became a prominent black area, around
1910, Harlem has been two contradictory neighborhoods-- both the
Zebra Room and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Rudolf Fisher,
another Renaissance author, described the place in his novel The
Walls of Jericho: It "remains for six nights a carnival, bright
with the lights of theaters and night clubs...Then comes
Sunday, and for a few hours Seventh Avenue...reflects that air
of quiet, satisfied self-righteousness peculiar to chronic
churchgoers."

Transfer those opposites to a man, and there's old Bill-- good as
gold, one day a week. Like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, like Harlem's
former Congressman, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., like
Gabriel Grimes, the preacher father in James Baldwin's Go Tell It
on the Mountain, he sins and repents, and then comes Monday.

Baldwin hated the Harlem of the 1950s, when drugs, the numbers
game and prostitution poisoned a place graced by George Gershwin
and Billie Holiday during the decades before the end of the
Second World War. In the 1960s, when Clinton walked 125th Street,
things got worse. But from the teens to the mid-1940s, the joint
jumped. Claude McKay celebrated the idea of coming Home to
Harlem, where life was sensuous and exotic; Zora Neale Hurston
moved up there after writing Their Eyes Were Watching God;
Countee Cullen wrote his poems; W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey
delivered their polemics; and Lena Horne sang in the chorus at Ed
Small's Sugar Cane Club.

And these days, Harlem is on the rise again, with Disney moving
in, and Rite Aid and Magic Johnson's movie theater. And Starbucks
and the Gap. And a revitalized Apollo Theater, and the
fashionable houses of Striver's Row made fashionable again. And
now, who should appear, ready to do business, but the Comeback
Kid himself?

Like the former President, Harlem attracts, repels and attracts
again. It is a sad and brazen place and yet, oddly, one in which
it is possible to see something essentially American that one
cannot see elsewhere. Here all the music and shadows of the
country flow together. Here thrives the figure of the adorable
con artist, like Harlem's Mr. Rinehart in Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, whose "world was possibility." He was "Rine the
runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the lover and Rine the
Reverend." His multiple identities occupied "a world without
borders...where Rine the rascal was at home."

This is how one begins to see Clinton, and how history may see
him as well--in his wide-brimmed hat and million-dollar zoot suit,
and a smile for everyone. After the heist of the White House
gifts, after the shady pardon of Marc Rich and the latest
brother-act pardons of the Clinton Going-Out-of-Business
sale--long after Monica--he emerges on 125th Street, larger even
than himself. He is the fallen preacher, the three-card-monte
dealer, and the best of all time. And he is going to bless and
disappoint and fool us again. But what the hell.